Two months ago, AT&T petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to plan for the retirement of traditional phone networks and transition to what AT&T sees as an inevitability: the all-IP telco.

AT&T had been discussing the transition internally, spurred on by the FCC's own suggestion that the Public Switched Telephone Network might be ripe for death somewhere around 2018. "This telephone network we've grown up with is now an obsolete platform, or at least a rapidly obsolescing platform," Hank Hultquist, VP of AT&T's federal regulatory division, said today. "It will not be sustainable for the indefinite future. Nobody's making this network technology anymore. It's become more and more difficult to find spare parts for it. And it's becoming more and more difficult to find trained technicians and engineers to work on it."

Hultquist was speaking as part of a Consumer Electronics Show panel titled "Introducing the All-IP Telco." The panel was moderated by Daniel Berninger, founder of a startup called VCXC (the Voice Communication Exchange Committee) devoted to speeding the transition to all-IP networks.

Although going all-IP signals the death of traditional telephone networks, Hultquist believes Internet Protocol-based networks will give voice calls a higher quality and greater importance. He looks forward to the integration of voice throughout the Web, something that is already happening with the likes of Skype on Facebook and Google Hangouts.

"Voice is the most efficient way to communicate," he said. "We have had the same voice service for 80 years. The voice quality you get when you make a call on the iPhone today is the same voice quality Bell Laboratories thought you should have in 1933. Shift forward 80 years, we're still using the same frequency response, 300 to 3300Hz." The human voice can make sounds at frequencies up to 20,000Hz.

When everything is IP, the telecom industries and IT industries will basically become one and the same, Berninger said. It'll be important to make the transition while preserving what's good about traditional phone networks, such as reliability and 911 services, he noted. In doing so, companies like AT&T will shed lots of complexity and potentially save a ton of money. AT&T's network services and content delivery would all be delivered using the same technology.

Obviously, an all-IP network lacks any traditional circuit switching. "If you take a central office, pull out all the TDM (time-division multiplexing) equipment, and put in all IP equipment, guess what happens? The central office disappears," Berninger said. "The first thing the telcos get is a whole lot of free real estate. … It's going to be a really great thing for AT&T. BT made a lot of money when they switched over to IP."

The switch to all-IP telcos will be far more complex than the switch to all-digital television, Hultquist said. "TV was one service. Phone companies like AT&T have thousands of services based on this legacy technology," he said. Why thousands? Hultquist notes that when you order traditional phone service, you choose from "a dizzying array of diff combinations of features: With voicemail, with caller ID, without caller ID, with various kinds of dialing capabilities."

Each different combination represents a service, or USOC (Universal Service Ordering Code), in the phone companies' parlance. Merging all of these into fewer IP services will help make service providers more efficient.

Of course, many customers have already switched to all-IP networks themselves, ditching landlines for cell phones and VoIP services. "We do believe there are significant opportunities here for expense savings," Hultquist said, noting that the numbers of Americans with landlines have dwindled. "There are some cost savings opportunities here and it's a good thing because the base of customers supporting that platform is so much smaller now than it was ten years ago."

In AT&T's aforementioned petition to the FCC, the company suggests some very preliminary steps. This would include in certain cities or regions to retire TDM equipment completely and deliver phone services using the Internet Protocol. Testing all-IP networks at a small scale may help identify potential technological roadblocks. The trials would not be exclusive to AT&T—any phone company could participate. The FCC is taking public comments on AT&T's proposal.

Less government interference, please

Of course, AT&T is also hoping for a more friendly regulatory environment (that is, a less extensive regulatory environment) as part of the IP transition.

"AT&T believes that this regulatory experiment will show that conventional public-utility style regulation is no longer necessary or appropriate in the emerging all-IP ecosystem," AT&T wrote in its petition to the FCC. "Monopoly-era regulatory obligations" aren't justified in the competitive marketplace known as the Internet, the company said.

The CES panelists repeatedly stated that today, telecom is a regulated industry while the Internet essentially is not—and they want to keep it that way.

Daniel Brenner, a newly appointed Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who was previously an attorney specializing on FCC policy and regulatory matters, expressed glee that a recent UN meeting did not result in the International Telecommunications Union "taking over" the Internet. Brenner says things like network neutrality should also die at the US level.

"If we oppose Internet regulation at the international level because it doesn't make sense, we need to make sure Internet regulation in the US does makes sense," Brenner said. "Network neutrality was very controversial. And really for many of us who didn't think that was a wise decision, it's because you needed market failure, something going on in a market that causes the regulator to come in. That hadn't really been demonstrated to the minds of many of us in the net neutrality context. Don't make it worse by regulating."

If AT&T gets all that it wants with its petition to the FCC, it would have fewer rules to follow in an IP future than it did in its PSTN past. As we reported in November, "Some industry watchers are worried such a move would make an end-run around existing regulations that require a baseline level of phone service under federal law."

One thing everyone can probably agree on is that the shift to all-IP networks is a big one.

"We have 100 years of traditional telecom playing out, colliding with 50 or 60 years of information technology, and the thing that comes out of that collision is an all-IP telco," Berninger said. "In five years we'll know what that looks like. At this point we can just guess. But it's going to be a very big deal."

In Norway the former government telco (privatized in 94 but with the government as a shareholder to this day) the has announced plans to retire the wired phone service completely, and move everyone over to mobile solutions.

I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe. Currently, a standard landline phone will still work in a power outage, which can be critical in emergencies. Cell towers can go out and cell coverage is not universal, so they wouldn't fill in the gap.

Well I have yet to hear a iPhone conversation of better quality than a Good PSTN / PRI...

I have found that while local calling quality is great VOIP it is so dependent on everything working well that unless At&t plans on upgrading their copper to provide GOOD IP services this is all just a joke... The great thing with a PRI is that you can loose some copper / channels and things will still work OK, yeah you may loose timing or something but call quality is hardly an issue. If you loose anything on a bonded circuit that is designed for your phone usage, your call quality immediately suffers, due to bandwidth issues.

I love voip, but At&t needs to get real, PSTN equipment is only part of their issue - they need to overhaul their entire phone network, this means replacing 20+ year old copper that is still all over the place... Not to mention the MILES and MILES of inline splices...

I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe. Currently, a standard landline phone will still work in a power outage, which can be critical in emergencies. Cell towers can go out and cell coverage is not universal, so they wouldn't fill in the gap.

I was wondering about what happens in a power outage. I think basically, that backup has already disappeared with modern phones being reliant on mains power. You don't normally get cordless, digital voice recording etc. without drawing on mains power.

I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe. Currently, a standard landline phone will still work in a power outage, which can be critical in emergencies. Cell towers can go out and cell coverage is not universal, so they wouldn't fill in the gap.

Well the landline works since they have backup power; towers have them as well.

I remember after a hurricane the phone went out 3 days later since the generator ran out of gas.

I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe.

Nothing. Phone companies aren't going to want to continue to maintain those banks of batteries and back-up generators. Those are just costs, and costs must be slashed so execs get their bonuses.

Tell ya what, Asses, Twits, & Turkeys, we'll let you get rid of all that old copper... in exchange for a Universal Requirement to wire every single home in your service area with fiber to the home. Deal?

I think basically, that backup has already disappeared with modern phones being reliant on mains power. You don't normally get cordless, digital voice recording etc. without drawing on mains power.

You can still get an old style phone that isn't cordless, doesn't have voice mail, or anything else that requires a separate power source. I have an older phone and a POTS line specifically so it will work during a power outage. And it's performed exactly as designed a few times during actual power outages.

Not to mention - At&t has no real plans to support anything but their own powerplay - I seriously doubt they will ever allow SIP trunking... my guess they will provide data circuits to the premise using existing copper (and the same old ISDN tech they have been using for years) and try to break free of the "public" use clauses on their existing copper, basically locking ANY other company out of providing circuits to users...

Didn't know people can reach 20khz or higher. I've tested myself with some test tones and found I can't hear anything over 17khz.

I'm about 19kHz in one ear, and about 20.5kHz in the other. It's age, genetics and history (loud music, etc..) dependent.

That being said, there's *very* little useful audio up there, most particularly for voice. Telephone would benefit from wider bandwidth guaranteed, but a sampling rate around 16kHz or so (allowing frequencies up to 8kHz) is going to be functionally very close to perfect for speech. Incidentally, this is pretty close to the sampling rate used by the under-adopted "HD Voice" standard if memory serves correctly.

In Norway the former government telco (privatized in 94 but with the government as a shareholder to this day) the has announced plans to retire the wired phone service completely, and move everyone over to mobile solutions.

Didn't know people can reach 20khz or higher. I've tested myself with some test tones and found I can't hear anything over 17khz.

I'm about 19kHz in one ear, and about 20.5kHz in the other. It's age, genetics and history (loud music, etc..) dependent.

That being said, there's *very* little useful audio up there, most particularly for voice. Telephone would benefit from wider bandwidth guaranteed, but a sampling rate around 16kHz or so (allowing frequencies up to 8kHz) is going to be functionally very close to perfect for speech. Incidentally, this is pretty close to the sampling rate used by the under-adopted "HD Voice" standard if memory serves correctly.

I find that incredibly odd. I can detect tones up to about 30 kHz and I'm 32.

You must have some professional grade audio equipment if it is even capable of that frequency. If not you are probably just sending a 30 kHz signal to your speakers and getting an attenuated 20 kHz signal out because of physical limitations of the hardware.

I hope you mean that it doesn't equal as in IP is superior in every way. Because I have never in my life regularly dealt with an audio system with worse quality than standard copper phone lines. The frequency bandwidth that was standardized back when systems were first being rolled out was specifically chosen because it was the bare minimum needed to reliably understand someone speaking. Every IP based system I've ever used has utterly destroyed standard landlines for clarity.

In Norway the former government telco (privatized in 94 but with the government as a shareholder to this day) the has announced plans to retire the wired phone service completely, and move everyone over to mobile solutions.

Isn't that incredibly dangerous in the case of a power outage?

I'm not in Norway, but I can charge my cell phone without mains power (car, solar, and hand-crank...), so the only problem would be if they don't keep the cell phone towers running. It's certainly possible that they won't, but it's no harder a problem to solve than keeping power to regular land-line telephones in the case of power outages to their distribution net.

It's definitely a bit more dangerous, just because not everyone will have charges like I do, but it's not a level of magnitude more dangerous. (And, in practice, it's probably closer than in theory, since just about everyone who does have a land line probably has a phone that requires mains power as well. The fact that you can run a basic phone completely off the phone power doesn't mean people do.)

I hope you mean that it doesn't equal as in IP is superior in every way. Because I have never in my life regularly dealt with an audio system with worse quality than standard copper phone lines. The frequency bandwidth that was standardized back when systems were first being rolled out was specifically chosen because it was the bare minimum needed to reliably understand someone speaking. Every IP based system I've ever used has utterly destroyed standard landlines for clarity.

Yup, you basically said what I was going to say. We have begun moving our phone service at work to an IP based delivery (SIP) from AT&T over their network (MPLS Cloud) and it sounds far better then a landline, especially if you call another AT&T SIP customer. The reaction is "Whoa, I can hear everything"

I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe. Currently, a standard landline phone will still work in a power outage, which can be critical in emergencies. Cell towers can go out and cell coverage is not universal, so they wouldn't fill in the gap.

I take it you don't make any long distance calls? Because nearly all of them are over IP anyway already. It's just being done by the phone company.

There's no reason a cell tower (or a hardline internet service...) couldn't be as reliable as a landline phone. It will just cost money to make it so. Though yes, the people at the end will need to be able to power their devices as well. Not impossible, and (as I said in another comment) quite likely to be necessary anyway these days. (I know my parents for instance only have cordless phones; if the power goes out they'll lose effective phone service faster than they'll lose cell service.)

The problem is telecommunication companies are trying to redefine themselves as anything other than telecommunication companies, but whether their service is provided over telephone wire, coaxial cable, wireless spectrum, or any future (or past) mode to telecommunicate, they will always be a telecommunication company. The FCC should stop trying to define what a telecommunication company is based on the media in which the telecommunication is transmitted over, and just define anyone to offers any form of telecommunication service (voice or data or future yada yada yada) as a telecommunication company and regulate them all the same. It would save a whole lot of time, money, and headache.

And if AT&T wants to get out of the Public Switched Telephone Network business, it should be forced give up "its" network to have it auctioned off seems how most of it was built and paid for by the Universal Service Fee (a.k.a. the public)! The network should be treated much like if AT&T wanted out of the wireless business and have to relinquish its network [read: spectrum] and allow the highest bidder given a chance to take over.

"And it's becoming more and more difficult to find trained technicians and engineers to work on it."

How about getting on with times and not abuse, over charge, and gouge people on ancient system? Or what about offer better pay? I don't expect engineers coming in that design steam engines from the 20's?

"a dizzying array of diff combinations of features: With voicemail, with caller ID, without caller ID, with various kinds of dialing capabilities."

Yes, extremely complicated systems to implement huh? No wonder it costs a dozen buck for each feature...

Fellow Ars readers, you have no idea how much I dislike AT&T. It seriously pisses me off the massive amount of hypocrisy involved in the whole blue company.

Didn't know people can reach 20khz or higher. I've tested myself with some test tones and found I can't hear anything over 17khz.

I'm about 19kHz in one ear, and about 20.5kHz in the other. It's age, genetics and history (loud music, etc..) dependent.

That being said, there's *very* little useful audio up there, most particularly for voice. Telephone would benefit from wider bandwidth guaranteed, but a sampling rate around 16kHz or so (allowing frequencies up to 8kHz) is going to be functionally very close to perfect for speech. Incidentally, this is pretty close to the sampling rate used by the under-adopted "HD Voice" standard if memory serves correctly.

I'd actually imagine that limiting the upper frequencies of speech would be advantageous in terms of reducing sibilance, which can be pretty deafening in close-miked situations.

I don't like VoIP and I don't like PSTN. One is an antiquated system and the other is a newer network modeled on an antiquated system. The only part of the old network that still uses the original hardware of the old analog system is the last mile, everything else is upgraded to newer technologies.

The real way to go from here on is pure internet connected devices. No VoIP, no PSTN, just direct connection to the internet everywhere you go and instant connection to everybody that's part of your social group. The real reason they want to drop PSTN is because they can't sell you as many add on services like they can with VoIP and they can't monopolize you without VoIP. If we had devices that simply connected to the internet, we'd have no need to be tied to a local provider and we could choose services for ourselves, even from a competitor. If we wanted caller ID, we'd have an app installed for it. If we wanted textual voice mail, to coin a phrase, "there's an app for that." I think you get the picture.

I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe. Currently, a standard landline phone will still work in a power outage, which can be critical in emergencies. Cell towers can go out and cell coverage is not universal, so they wouldn't fill in the gap.

Dude, HD Voice is vastly superior to POTS/ISDN and it's kind of the floor for VoIP quality standards these days since it's targeted at mobile applications. Also the experience during both Katrina and Sandy was that cellphones (and in particular SMS and data) were vastly more robust than PSTN networks where the low numbers of available circuits compared to residents was a serious bottleneck in people reaching help. The mobile network could be further improved by a simple mandate that wherever physically feasible all tower sites should have the same redundant 48 hour battery banks that have been required for CO's since forever.

"AT&T believes that this regulatory experiment will show that conventional public-utility style regulation is no longer necessary or appropriate in the emerging all-IP ecosystem," AT&T wrote in its petition to the FCC. "Monopoly-era regulatory obligations" aren't justified in the competitive marketplace known as the Internet, the company said.

It's been my observation and experience with this shit company that they need less regulation like most people here want a bullet in the head.

By the by, here in Australia we are doing the same thing. But we aren't doing it with "no government interference", rather it is our government that is doing it. They asked the local Telco's to do it but they flatly refused. It seems the primary incumbent (our version of AT&T) views the copper network (which was built with government funds and given to them - just like the US's) as big fat cash cow which they indent to milk for all they are worth.

Faced with that intransigence the government formed a corporation to replace all the copper with fibre to the premises. If everything goes according to plan it will obsolete copper network. Outflanked the local incumbents hand was forced, so they agreed to shut down the copper network as the fibre was rolled out, in return for a few billion. And thus we will end up with history sort of repeating itself - with the local loop owned by a government monopoly once again. It's not a guaranteed monopoly as everybody is allowed to roll out their own land line infrastructure, but as we all know land lines tend toward a natural monopoly - which is what got us into this mess in the first place. Well that and the government being dumb enough to privatise a natural monopoly.

Once the NBN (which is what this is called) is rolled out all voice traffic will be SIP based. Each house with have a box with has two traditional analogue phone ports, which translate the analogue to SIP. The bandwidth needed by SIP voice is so small they give it to you gratis. You still need to pay someone to terminate the SIP end point - ie provide a phone number. ISP's do that here already over ADSL, so that's no big deal. For those of you wondering about power failures - the box comes with batteries, which the owner has to maintain.

The entire thing is going to cost us around $37 billion or $50 billion - depending on how you add it up. If they get the anticipated signup rate the new corporation should be able to fund that and earn 7% return for the government on their investment - which is more than it pays to borrow the money. The anticipated sign up rate is conservative - it is just people with land line internet now rolling over. It's not like they have a whole pile of choice - it's roll over to the NBN for use 4G which costs 10 times as much per byte. But it's not entirely risk free. We have yet to see if the NBN can pull off what will be a huge engineering feat on budget and on time.

If they the task should be completed by 2020 or so. At that point all copper will be decommissioned and all POTS exchanges will be landfill.

So there you have it USA. It would be impressive to see if AT&T pull off the same thing by 2018.

Where I live, most people get their phone service through the cable company. You have a box outside your house that connects on one side to the cable line. The other side has regular analog phone ports. The service costs less than ATT and it has better quality.

RE: the power going out, the last few times my neighborhood was destroyed by a tornado, the power was out for quite a while. My UPSes ran out quite quickly, so I don't know how long my landlines lasted, however, cell service lasted for days. That is not to say, the lines were not jammed for quite a while.

One thing they will have a hard time replacing is when the power is completely out - landlines still (most of the time) function as they are powered from the source of the connection (meaning the service provider).

Services from Comcast offer 911 connected emergency connections - but when the power is dead - someone that may need the service is SOL. Whereas - currently a landline ATT Customer can call thru.

(Yeah cell phones - blah blah blah....) But what happens when the Cell Towers are hit - no signal.

As for Net Neutrality - I constantly hear different definitions going back and forth for it being a good or bad thing.... Does ATT and Comcast and Verizon et al need to be regulated ? Yes. History has shown over and over again that these giant companies cannot be trusted with self-regulation.

ATT (the article does not mention this example) still charges for text messaging as a seperate service. They used to charge for voice mail - call waiting - caller ID - all of which have been integrated into the core service for a flat rate. Except for texting. Which is somehow NOT considered Media (for most of the cellular Internet packages - like the mandatory one that goes along with all iPhones). I can download video - Surf the Internet - eMail - IM - Send photos and videos - download Applications - etc....

But if I send text through SMS - i get charged for it. Sprint and T-Mobile have migrated this into their media plans (not sure about Verizon) but ATT is still ttrying to milk the separate cost.

I'm sorry but these companies practice too many shady activities to be let loose on their own.

So, err, how do they plan on providing wired voice services to people who are outside of city limits (e.g. no cable or DSL).

What about emergency capabilities such as making sure that the phone works, even when utilities power isn't available?

I suspect that many people who have cut off their land line haven't thought about these things.

What happens if there is some kind of natural disaster (flood, fire, mudslide, ice storm, blizzard, whatever is appropriate for your region) and the power is out for several days, and you can't leave your home?

How do you dial 911 when your cell phones' battery is dead?

How do you dial 911 when the cell towers are laying on the ground because of a tornado or earthquake?

Disregarding all of those, what if you have poor cell reception in your home from all carriers?

What if you're using a VoIP service and a wired ISP, but your ISP hasn't chosen to make their network as resilient as phone companies are required to (e.g. 48 hours of battery plus generators on site)?

I do *not* support the death of wired circuit-switched voice without some method of guaranteed access to *wired* universal phone service that has the same reliability metrics as the current system.

What AT&T's request really sounds like to me is "Please make us no longer be a regulated utility.", they want to ditch the requirements of regulation and make their network into a pure "Information Services" system, so that they can play on a level field with the cable companies. Unfortunately, this will put many rural Americans at a disadvantage when it comes to voice communications.